Category Archives: e-books

Brief background: A few days ago, Mick, an illustrator from Australia, was kind enough to leave a comment on my bio page, in which he mentioned the somewhat bewildering array of information out there regarding self-publishing and whether to do it all yourself, or outsource it all–or which road between the two options to follow. Here’s my take:

The first step you need to take is back.

If you’re thinking of self-pubbing, then step back. Step away from your project, from the minutiae of research on the how to-s and the what to-s and all that important stuff.

Survey the territory–starting with YOU!

Once you’ve got some distance, look around, at your circumstances, your budget and your resources. As importantly, look at who you are and how you like to work. Are you someone who likes control? Or do you prefer someone else to deal with the details and nitty-gritty stuff, so you just see, and approve or seek changes, at key steps in the project? This will give you some answers about which route to take. Continue reading →

A few stolen moments, sitting on a smoothed out piece of driftwood by the lake, reading my kindle and thoroughly enjoying the sunshine--particularly since the device's display isn't competing with it, but is instead clear and easy to read.

Okay, so the title of the post makes it seem like it’s about five years too late. We all know the Kindle has changed all kinds of games and–for now, at least–is keeping up with the game-changing action, in ways that are sometimes more freeing for authors (in relation to gatekeeper/publishers) and in other ways more restrictive and monopolistic (in relation to choice of distribution channels and options for selling).

Such topics have been discussed exhaustively. So instead, I propose to add to the large body of posts about the personal process of acquiring and using an e-reader–and in particular, a Kindle.

Why the Kindle?

As a Canadian, I did feel a little disloyal. The Kobo touch is a pretty slick little device, and was at the vanguard in its particular form factor. But none of my research (including exploring the device itself on a couple of occasions) seemed to reveal a function that would allow me to make annotations and highlights and then export them and use them elsewhere.* For me, this was important, because I wanted to be able to load up my writing on the device and read it on the kind of interface a consumer would experience–but with the added ability to mark it up so that if I found typos, or wanted to delete things or make notes to self about revisions, then I could do that easily and quickly. Kindle could do this, and nothing I could determine about the Kobo allowed for it (nor Sony etc.).

When I’ve wanted to procrastinate, one of my techniques for prolonging idleness has been to phrase search my book titles (sometimes with authorname) on google. This has led to my finding reviews etc. on some occasions (that’s my justification, anyway). Once again, my little procrastination bid has turned up a pirate–this time of one of my contemporary romances, which is currently a top seller in my catalogue (it sounds so cool and important, calling it a “catalogue”, when about 8 months ago it was “the folder of word documents on my computer”).

As I mentioned in the previous discussions and comments about this issue, I’ve decided to just leave it be, going forward. As I have time, I’ll be changing the files for all my books to make some comment about supporting indie authors, and urging the reader to buy a copy of some of my other books if they like this one. But ultimately, the decision will be up to the reader.

I’m at peace with that–at least for now. Who knows what I might think about the issue in a year or two? The core factors at the heart of so many of these debates are changing so rapidly that the overall model itself is still in flux, I would say. But for now, I’m good.

Still, I’ll admit that it helps that this lated pirated work is a book I wrote a while ago, and so I don’t have the same closeness to it as I do to Konstantin’s Gifts (which I also worked a lot harder on, I’ll admit–research, story arcs, the whole bit).

Warning: this post is not necessarily all that engaging for most readers. It’s mainly aimed at fellow writers who are trying to decide whether or not to do the KDP Select program and drills down into the fairly dry details of my little experiments.

And, for those of you writers who have read many many of these KDP Select follow up posts, I’d say the three things that make these figures a little different, at least to the other reports that I’ve read on KDP Select results are:

1) I’ve got several books in multiple genres;

2) I’ve tried the promo on different days in different ways, with vastly differing results;

3) the improvement in sales has been palpable and gratifying, but not the kind of mind-blowing figures others seem to have experienced. Continue reading →

The fabulous Emily Casey has stopped by with an extremely helpful post on creating a book trailer, as part of her author blog tour!

Emily is the author of The Fairy Tale Trap, a young adult novel about Ivy Thorn, a smart and resourceful teen who must extricate herself from the fractured fairy tale in which she finds herself trapped.

Emily has also graciously offered to give away a ebook edition of her novel, downloadable via Smashwords. Check out her fabulous book trailer and the first couple of sample chapters on her website, then come back and enter the draw! All you have to do is leave a comment on this blog before February 3rd (limit of one general comment per day). Additional entries can be added by subscribing to Emily’s or my twitter feeds, liking our FB pages, and posting or tweeting about the giveaway. Be sure to leave a separate comment for each of the above. I’ll run it through a random number generator to select a winner.

Hey, Kat! Thanks for letting me come on your blog. Today’s post is about how to make a book trailer for $0. Because if I can do it, so can anyone.

Being an independent self-publisher is hard work. It’s even harder to do it for cheap. A lot of authors try to cut costs where they can, and a lot don’t even consider making a book trailer. I think this is a mistake. A book trailer lets you show readers how great your book is in 90 seconds. Plus, it’s fun to make.

Now, I have zero experience making videos. There are a million ways to make a book trailer (Macs have similar, if not better, movie-making software), but here’s how I did mine. Continue reading →

Some of you have already read my previous post, expressing the KDP Select formulation in terms of the Prisoner’s Dilemma–as well as the update on that post, which was the result of Catana, one of my writer friends, pointing out that the Kindle Library only allows for one book download per month. The basic recap, for those who have not read them, is that with the one book per month limit for Amazon Premium members, it seems pretty clear that for an author like me: 1) whose price point is below a certain threshold, and 2) who isn’t particularly high profile as a writer, opting into KDP Select–and thereby having to go exclusive with my listings and remove them from Smashwords and all its distribution outlets–probably isn’t worthwhile (conceptually it’s upsetting to have to do anyway, but my hypothesis was that even at the level of revenue, it wasn’t worth it). Most Amazon Premium members, in order to make their membership worth it, would more likely use their “free” signout on someone far higher profile, whose books are significantly more expensive. I know I would.

I also decided to test this, by enrolling several of my contemporary romance novels, published under a different pseudonym, which I hadn’t gotten around to listing on Smashwords. I was just curious to see how they did, and since they were already exclusive by default, I wasn’t losing much. I also figure that for those of you who are wondering how well this might have worked for you, I can at least provide some kind of baseline.

So, the basics: I enrolled four books. Three of them were 50K word contemporary romances at $1.99 each. The fourth book is a 3 in 1 bundle of the individual books for $2.99.

ASIDE: Those of you familiar with the royalty scheme at Amazon (books priced at $2.98 and lower, as well as books priced above $9.99, only provide the author with a 35% royalty off the cover prices, while books in the sweet spot range between $2.99 and $9.99 provide the author with a 70% royalty) will note that I’m getting exactly the same royalty by selling all three books for $2.99 as I am for selling each book at $1.99–even though the reader is paying double. I wanted to see to what extent people would go for the half price value bundle versus the individual books (fyi, they mostly go for the value bundle, which sells about as well as An Immodest Proposal, my top seller as Kathryn Anthony, but I still do get the occasional single sale).

I enrolled them on the date of my previous post or thereabouts–namely, around the 10th of December.

So–what kind of big buck$$$ did I rake in as a result of enrolling these books into the KDP Select, exclusivity deal that prevents me from listing them elsewhere? How many eager readers downloaded my indie-priced books for free, thereby making me eligible for some as-yet unknown portion of the KDP Select Fund pie? Continue reading →

UPDATE: as Catana points out in the comments, the analysis below is partly premised on a mistaken assumption that I made (and which Amazon is not in any rush to correct in their KDP Select Terms of Use). Namely, I’d assumed that the library consists of unlimited loans. But it doesn’t. It’s one per month. So, most users are likely to use their one “borrow” for books that are more expensive (~$6.50 or higher, to make it worth the $79 annual fee)–NOT books at indie pricing. This means that we’re still where we were before, but many indies (esp. people like me who aren’t in the US, and so are less likely to check the Amazon Prime Lending Library’s terms) won’t realise this, and will opt in under a false assumption. Tsk, Tsk, Amazon. No doubt it was just an oversight. I’ve left the rest of the post intact, because depending on your pricing and your popularity, this analysis might still be relevant in helping to determine whether you will opt in or not. /update

In Homer’s The Odyssey, Scylla and Charybdis were fearsome sea monsters who existed in sufficient proximity to each other that any sailors who wished to brave those waters had to sail very carefully indeed, between the two horrors. More contemporary speculations posit Scylla as a rock shoal and Charybdis as a whirlpool.

And at the moment, I find myself to be caught between the two of them. To break it down:

Wow–a busy few months! Not only has school started up again (final year! w00t! Though in truth, I love studying, and am actually a little sad to see the end of it.), but I had ambitious plans to try to release 1-2 of my queued up, forthcoming titles.

So, what are some of the great things that have happened these past two months?

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I’ve tried a couple of different apps whose purpose of existence is to alert users to the existence of other apps that are temporarily discounted or free. So far, the standout for me is Apps Gone Free. I’m not a … Continue reading →

A while back, I did a side-by-side review of the in-app dictation software in the more recent iOS versions and the free Dragon dictation app. The in-app software won (sad though I am to admit it, as I do love … Continue reading →

Looking back through my old posts, I was simultaneously astonished and chagrined that I had not yet written anything about Goodreader. It was one of my early purchases on the iPad and has been one of my top, go-to apps … Continue reading →

I’m a productivity junkie. Modern life, with all its devices, information and demands means that if you’ve got your fingers in more than one pie (and most of us do) we can’t afford to waste a moment–and that if we’re … Continue reading →